Managing your Research

This article is for those who are having their first research study and facing problems while managing their research study.

When you have your first research work and experience you face a lot of challenges. The main reason for this is that these things are usually not taught in universities research methodology courses neither your supervisor can help you in these things. Supervisor can only motivate you, guide you when you stuck and can check the originality and quality of your contents.

So, the first critical phase in your research is topic selection and proposal writing. Always try to choose a topic of your interest, that you think you will feel fine with this and will enjoy your research.

Before you choose any topic and write a proposal you must have background knowledge and have studied some prior literature. At the start you need to study at-least 10 to 15 papers for your proposal writing, topic selection and background knowledge. You can also consult books for background knowledge. After studying this do a critical Analysis of that, this will give you insights to the main issues of the area. Now choose an area for your prospective research. Based on this study you can now write a proposal. This may be called narrow downing your research.

Now start studying state of the art literature, which is most related to your area and topic.

Mostly initial researchers also face problems in writing other chapters and sections of their report, such as introduction, Methodology, validation, results and discussion etc. During my MS our research methodology teacher told us about “free writing’ which is very important especially for beginners. Just write down whatever you have in your mind, it may be scattered but combing, integrating and relating is not a big issue. So, free writing, boldness and confidence are the notable factors. Several times a person have very good ideas but they cannot document it accordingly.

A tactic which I personally use for this is that I do write all the sections like Abstract, Introduction, Literature Review, and so on. Now as I told earlier that during proposal writing you must have to study some prior research work, so, basically that is the start of your Literature review. Note it down in your literature review section.

At this moment keep in mind that each university has their own rules and standards for research. Like we had two research modules Independent study (IS) 1 and 2. During the course of IS-1 we have to study 15 papers (not older than 5 years) and have to write a summary, findings and limitations of each paper. We have to submit two reports from them a long in APA writing style and a short in IEEE format. Then in IS-2 we were bound to present something new. It may be a model, a framework or a tool properly following a research methodology, followed by validation, showing the results to claim the significance of contribution.

According to my opinion literature acts as a king for the entire research, because when you work on your research project, you will have to consult literature for many things and questions that arise in your mind, such as writing proposal, topic selection, introduction writing, methodology, validation etc. so whenever and wherever you stuck consult literature to know about how and what others have done. You will definitely find an answer.

Thanks.

Good Luck…